>The technique ranges from silently
>allowing people to assume they are not qualified for Food Stamps and
>Medicaid, to actually lying to them.
>Max surprises me with his "more dollars spent" argument as I'm most
>used to hearing that argument from Rush Limbaugh.
"More dollars spent" is significant, if progressive activists respond to the opportunity correctly and deal creatively with the problems noted by created by Joseph and Doug.
The fact is that more dollars spent on fewer people means that there is an economic transfer of funds occuring within those in poverty. In the ideal of welfare reform, that transfer would be from those who only used welfare opportunistically and now have found getting a job more attractive, while those with serious obstacles to employment are receiving a greater share of the funds in order to help them gain the basic skills and assistance on child care needed to enter the workforce eventually. To the extent this is occuring, the more funds are something that should be welcomed.
On the other hand, from all evidence, that is only partially what is occuring, as many of the most needy fall out of the system due to lack of knowledge of how to access the new system or due to punitive exclusions by case workers.
However, the availability of more funds than many state systems expected creates an opportunity to pressure the system for reforms that were impossible in the past due to the rigidity of the AFDC system- a complaint progressives had against welfare long before Bill Clinton showed up on the scene. We see the beginnings of this struggle among workfare organizers in a number of cities and the earlier history of Welfare Rights organizing has some lessons on how to collectively demand access for the poor excluded from the system. Before I left Oakland, our Bread Work and Justice coalition had done quite a bit of work to pressure the County to reach out to the community through a wide array of community organizations to assure information was available on the new system. Across the country, there are a lot of people falling through the system, but there are ways to challenge it.
But the availability of more funds cannot be dismissed, since without them, no amount of pressure on local welfare systems would be able to yield results if funding was being cut-off from state and federal sources.
--Nathan Newman